Now it's time for drawing some text! Well, that is not so much to talk about, so we are also adding an fps counter and increasing the number of images drawn each loop until the fps drops, just so we can see it happen.

https://github.com/tornseglare/ShootThemAll/releases/tag/v1.2

Take a look in ShootThemAll.mgcb:

This is mainly telling the content builder we have a file named Font.spritefont. This file in turn is an XML file describing first and most that we would like to use the Arial font. We also expect the font Arial to be installed in windows, but there are ways to ship your own font files.

The next step is to load it into memory, which happens in Art.cs:

The line content.Load<SpriteFont>(“Font”); loads Arial into memory. (As specified in Font.spritefont.)

Just to recap, let's have a look into the Draw() function in ShootThemAllGame.cs:

This line draws the given text at the given textPos using our font Art.Font.

An FPS counter is fun and really good to have when developing your stuff as it shows you when things start to get heavy to draw.

Let's start with the code:

ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds is the number of milliseconds elapsed since the last time Draw() was called by monogame. In our simple game we use the default settings which means we request a maximum of 60 frames per second.

double fps = 1000 / gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds;

Drawing a few images should not put any load to the system, so we should get an fps close to 59.99. Monogame allows us to turn off the frame rate limitation which you will see me doing in a later version.

Just to see the frame rate drop we draw more and more images each loop. The count variable is continuously increased in each loop in Update(). In Draw() I have a simple for() loop drawing images at random locations:

After some time several thousand skulls are drawn each time Draw() is called, and eventually the frame rate starts to drop. This is a crude tool to see what your graphic card can do. Try to build the project in release mode and run it again, you should notice a higher framerate.

This statement instructs monogame to draw our images using the images alpha-channel. Since our image Art.Skull (Content/Art/spontaneous.png) has transparency around the cloudy skull monogame will draw the white skull while the surrounding pixels in the image are not drawn.

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